Three generations of writers, white and black, have tried to arouse South Africans to a recognition of what they saw as a growing spiritual and moral aridity and a tighter political extremism resulting from the systems of apartheid. Now it is 1980, thousands of printed protest pages later, and the National government is still in power, having grown unwieldy and corrupt, but not seriously challenged by white opposition parties and, so far, capable of destroying black opposition before it finds a voice or, having found one, has disseminated any message. (p. 19)

With these irrefutable realities before me, and the constant comments of political scientists on the suicidal stupidity of white South Africa, I ask myself, who are we, we blind and paralysed white South Africans? And coincidentally, it is just at this time that I begin to find my answers in the novel, specifically in four...